A community of hope in Christ

Christianity 101

The Gateway to Encountering God …

All kinds of people in all kinds of cultures over thousand of years have come to the humbling conclusion that there really is a God who made us, who loves us, and who we can know right now. But we can’t experience God on our own terms just as we can’t truly experience another person on our own terms… we don’t get to make up the God we want, but we can encounter the God who is. This God, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, is a disturbing God. Encountering this God will not leave you unchanged.

Christianity is about a way of living life in relationship with God. Like any relationship it includes believing and doing. I believe certain things about the people I love. The more accurate my perception of them, the better I am able to know them and love them. But real love is not just belief or empty words – it also involves action – doing real acts of love. So what I believe and what I do really matters. Could it be that just as there are physical principles (like the law of gravity) that govern the physical universe, so too there are basic spiritual principles which were meant to govern my soul ? What if there was a path waiting for me, a path not of my own making, but made by the one who made me ?!

Here are six stepping stones on the way to growing in a relationship with God. These steps are part of an ancient path – they are the essentials of what Christians have believed, across different centuries, cultures, denominations, and languages. They form Christianity 101. Think of them as a series of doorways to step through. If you can embrace the first principle, then you are ready to step through the door to the next principle. Clicking on a principle will take you to a fuller explanation of it. See how far you are ready to go!

Click on any of the six principles below to dig into it in more detail.